Rona Pondick Sculptures Récentes

Pondick is an artist who adds new reality to the real, but she never interprets the materiality of the world by the means of an image. On the contrary she confronts us with the reality and the hard immediacy of an “objectness” molded with her own hands. In her recent sharply focused work the authenticity of these objects is reinforced by impressions taken from her own body (skull, face, hands). Pondick superimposes her own face on a dog or monkeys or other animals, and when her face is fused with the body of a dog, the dog becomes a sphinx. The dialectic of head and anus reappears in the entanglement of monkeys as a metaphor of the polarity-light. (rationality/spirit/head) and dark eroticism ( excretion/anus/sexuality).  

 Superimposition and fragmentation, and the procedure of pars pro-toto and multifragmentation are among the approaches to a precise strategy that contributes to the legibility of such works. In her early work, these were-and are-real objects symbolizing substantiality (e.g., fabric, earth, etc.) but also materials loaded with allusiveness or metaphysical properties (wax). These components reappear in the course of time. In her current work Pondick is searching for an enduring concretness : shining steel, richly finished as an utopian projection of our future reality. She performs a translation in stainless steel, the metal of our century, while avoiding it’s petrifying quality, transforming it into plasticity designed to carry a multiplicity of associations. Highly polished stainless-steel has the power to reflect and the onlooker becomes a partner of the mise-en-scène.

Pondick’s works were described as “Freudian vaudeville acts”, but they are principally fruits of a desire to control her world and to invite the onlooker to open his own interpretations. They are all pieces for our fantasies.

Peter Weiermair, Considerations about the work of Rona Pondick (extract).